La joie

Les Ténèbres #2

by Georges Bernanos

Thème fondamental chez Georges Bernanos, la joie est le titre d'un de ses plus grands livres, son troisième roman, couronné par le prix Femina en décembre 1929. L'action se déroule dans le château normand de M de Clergerie, historien médiocre, obsédé d'ambitions académiques, dont la carrière est devenue toute sa vie. Autour de lui, sa mère et son dérisoire trousseau de clés, murée dans le mensonge ; Fiodor, le chauffeur russe destructeur, étrangement sensible au mysticisme ; Fernande, la cuisinière ; François, le valet.
Et au milieu d'eux, Chantal de Clergerie, jeune fille radieusement belle, don permanent d'elle-même, toute pureté, fraîcheur et joie. Elle devra faire face à des personnages redoutables : La Pérouse, le psychiatre "forceur de secrets", et surtout Cénabre, le prêtre sans foi. Tous les personnages de La Joie, hormis Chantal et Fernande, sont des adultes qui ont perdu leur enfance, c'est-à-dire leur vérité.
Leurs rêves d'enfant, un jour, ont été déçus et humiliés. Blessé par cette "déception fondamentale", chacun s'est aliéné à soi-même, englué dans son mensonge propre, victime plus ou moins aveugle de l'Imposteur, Prince de ce monde.

Genres: Fiction, France, Catholic

244 pages

First published May 1, 1929

About the author

Georges Bernanos était un écrivain français, gagneur du Grand Prix du Roman de l'Académie française en 1936 avec Journal d'un curé de campagne.

George Bernanos was a French writer. His 1936 book, Journal d'un curé de campagne (Diary of a Country Priest), won the Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française.

Reviews

[Czarny Pies · Rating 2 out of 5]

Le grand don de Bernanos est de savoir présenter la guerre entre Dieu et le Diable comme une suite de faces-à-faces ou duels ce qui rend le conflit très dramatique.
La protagoniste de "La Joie" est une jeune fille de vingt ans très joyeuse et très pure. Elle accepte sans réserve le sort que Dieu lui réserve. Elle défend sa foi extrêmement simple avec une lucidité remarquable. Le roman raconte quatre confrontations entre elle et quatre suppôts de Satan dont elle sort victorieuse à chaque occasion.
Le premier démon n'est nulle autre que son père, M. de Clergerie, un historien médiocre qui croit à tort qu'il est capable de chercher un fauteuil à l'Académie française. Un veuf, il veut se marier parce qu'il croit que ca aider sa cause. Il veut que Chantal rentre dans un couvent pour avoir la paix.
Le deuxième démon est La Pérouse un psychiatre. Il sort de son débat avec Chantal avec sa foie en la science ébranlée.
Le troisième suppôt de Satan est Fiodor le chauffeur de M. de Clergerie. Fiodor est russe éthéromane, et a des tendances nihilistes. Sa pensée n'est pas bien expliqué Bernanos ce qui est malheureux car Fiodor va jouer un role clé dans l'intrigue.
Le quatrième démon est l'abbé Cénabre le protagoniste "L’Imposture". Cénabre est un intellectuel célèbre du Catholicisme qui cache le fait qu'il a perdu la foi parce qu'il aime son statut à l'intérieure de l'Église et des cercles intellectuels catholiques francais. Il sort perdant de son débat avec la joyeuse Chantal.
"La Joie" a gagné le Prix Femina en 1929. C'est trop. "La Joie" est roman prometteur mais il n'est certainement pas au même niveau des grands classiques de Bernanos tel que "Le Journal d'un curé de campagne" ou "La Nouvelle histoire de Mouchette". Chantal est vraiment trop éloquente pour une jeune fille de vingt ans. Le dénouement est plutôt mélodramatique.
"La Joie" est qui plaira à ceux qui sont des grands amateurs de Bernanos mais pas à la grande majorité des lecteurs contemporains.

[Holly · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have been quite struck by the message of advent and the prevailing thoughts of today. The advent message to wake up and stand watch strikes persistently at me. I want to, for the first time in my life, attend to it with dead seriousness. My normal condition has been to be nominally attuned, light my candles, and maybe do the advent readings with daily advent centered devotions. At advent I notice the wake up! readings at Mass. I think- yeah, I am kind of oversaturated with life stuff- the wake up always seems like a small cry that quickly gets drowned out by the immediacy of life and all of its demands that must always be done yesterday. This year though I hear an internal shout WAKE UP! I know enough to not say, “I’m not sure what this means” so I say- be the one who kept watch for the master’s return. Don’t let your heart grow weary. Do you not know that your life is not your own? These sentiments keep parading through my conscious thought and will be rattling around against the backdrop of my every day. So with that said. A book that seems appropriate.
I shifted spiritually after reading this shocking book. Funny, a book called Joy is shocking. But, I was appalled, horrified, and held transfixed by Bernanos’ story of joy. The cover art selected is adorned with soft flowers and muted pastel tones. I thought it would be a book about joy- but one of us is significantly off about what joy is and I instinctively realized it was me and not Bernanos. I also looked upon an idea that is so shocking, I can only say it’s not natural. The Chantal of this story is almost a freak, maybe freakish but sublime. Yes, it’s true. Read this if you can. This book terrified me but also, draws me near, near enough to want to embrace the darkest aspects of what could ever happen to me or in this world with an infinite well that is not my own of course, but that of something beyond what we can know except to be utterly in love…with God. The lives of saints are often perplexing it is hard to understand their perceptions, their willingness, the running forward into horror. I believe they alone know true joy (now I will think of this quality as joy and not fervency). Joy we hear a lot, is not happiness, joy is a crossroad of acceptance and peace, not a condition received by the arrangement of external set of events that are not well, God centered, really. I think joy is sometimes misunderstood to be an overflow of happiness; the ability to see beauty in all circumstances; but I think it is not those things actually, it is living in the sublime despite all circumstances. That is, seeing God in all circumstances. This, of course, is not humanly possible as I think it requires an abundance of grace to integrate it into our being. To know that one is connected to the true source of sublimity, consider Chantal. Consider our Lord, who wept all night in a garden under the stars- alone- because of me. Life, so full of horrors for some and others…they live so happily in ignorance of this. It strikes me that so many people count on their tomorrows without realizing how close we are to terror the terror of finding we have not been on the narrow road after all. I have read that Bernanos is an author who is psychologically terrifying. This was my first foray into his work, and I sure wasn’t expecting this novel about joy to be…well, what I found within its pages. Now I know, it couldn’t be anything else. I must reconsider everything now. Joy is what I’ve always considered lacking in my serious nature. It isn’t a mood and it isn’t a personality trait. It isn’t really something you can create for yourself by saying “today I’m joyful.” No…it’s not positivity. It is the visible, or invisible condition of a soul turned toward the Son. It must be Him.
Chantal will perplex me and she has taught me in a moment so much. Joy- it’s not what you think it is.

[Hannah ✨ScruffyCityReads✨]

This is one I’m going to sit with for a little bit and then read again armed with post it notes and a pencil. I did enjoy it! But there’s a depth to it that I didn’t always give myself space to consider when I was reading. It warrants a repeat in a few months.

[Andrew Weitzel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novel ran a similar path of the other two Bernanos novels I have read ("Diary of a Country Priest" and "Under the Sun of Satan") in that it starts slow, builds up some sort of weird religious mystical pressure, and then explodes into unexpected craziness. The story in "Joy" follows a young girl with a saint-like purity and simplicity who lives with her neurotic father, her demented yet shrewd grandmother, and a host of weird servants including a vaguely criminal Russia chauffeur. The already confused atmosphere of the house is thrown into further turmoil with a looming marriage and visits from a cynical psychologist and a priest with a secret he fears was betrayed. Can't really talk about it beyond that without giving away major spoilers, so I'll conclude with a recommendation that you read it, since it was pretty good. Kind of Dostoevsky-sh.

[Mélanie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Une réflexion audacieuse et résolument moderne sur l'amour à l'âge mur. La lystérieuse C. Magnani tisse un joli court roman qui incite à aimer à tout âge en réinventant le concept de la vie de couple.

[sch]

Jan 2026. Bernanos's third novel. Judging by the first page, it seems to be a sequel to THE IMPOSTOR. At the end of the earlier book, a young lady in Paris, Chantal de Clergerie, tried to "give all her joy" to her dying confessor, whom she greatly admired. She had hoped for an edifying deathbed scene but was brutally disappointed; Father Chevance felt abandoned by God and considered his life an utter failure; she left the room ashamed and apparently headed for cynicism. Even worse, her father misunderstood Chevance's dying words about another priest, Father Cénabre, taking them as an endorsement of his wisdom and spiritual leadership. But Chevance only mentioned him in delirium because he knew Cènabre's secret: that he is an "impostor" in the Church, a man who never believed in God, at all, but pursued the priesthood for other reasons. The most unsettling parts of IMPOSTOR are the twists and turns of that hypocrite's mind, who until now had never admitted his hypocrisy to himself. When he finally recognizes the gap where faith should be, he discovers another impostor in his soul, a demonic personality. If JOY is anything like Bernanos's first two books, the plot will be obscure, and psychological commentary will be the book's dominant feature.

Ten pages in: it's like a totally different author. Is this a matter of translation, or is the original French different, too? The setting, characters, and dialogue of JOY are dramatically unlike IMPOSTOR, although I sometimes see resemblances to SOUS LE SOLEIL.

After 100 pages: Okay, by now I see how to reconcile the two books. It is definitely a sequel. Cènabre has yet to appear, but he is expected to arrive this evening as a visitor to the country estate of de Clergerie family. So far, the book has focused entirely on this household. Chantal, aged 18 or so, lives with a bookish, sickly, petty father and an embittered, half-mad grandmother; her mother died years ago. We meet several servants. The cook is a decent sort, but the maid and valet are insolent, self-involved, gossipy, and headed for disaster. The older Russian chauffeur is worse, a profligate of uncertain intentions and wicked intelligence. The father sees none of this.

The chauffeur Fiodor occasions the first two conflicts in the plot, one between characters and one within a character. Several times, Fiodor has found, or snuck up on, Chantal in what he describes as a state of prayerful ecstasy; we are led to suppose that the supernatural joy she gave to the dying Chevance has been replaced by something higher and better, as is our Lord's wont. A private and humble person, Chantal is rightly offended and distressed by this invasion of her privacy. But then the second, internal conflict arises, for she doubts her own sanity. Her mother and grandmother have reputations for neurosis and mental breakdown. Was she really praying, or is she just sick in the head? How could three hours pass without her knowing? (In THE IMPOSTOR, Cènabre, too, lost track of time in the state of possession.) The novel leaves this question open for now, although numerous flashbacks to the conversations of Chevance and Chantal suggest her holiness is real.

Monsieur de Clergerie is a third source of conflict. Bernanos takes us deep inside this little man's psyche. At first, it seems that ambition is the driving force of his life. As a historian with many published books (like Cènabre), de Clergerie's adulthood has been a persistent search for social recognition, symbolized in his mind by election to the French Academy. But ambition is only a foretaste of a much greater sin, his deep-seated envy of his daughter's goodness, happiness, and intelligence -- her whole way of life. In an aside, the narrator reveals that he felt much the same way about her mother, which probably contributed to her early death. Around page 90, M. de Clergerie tells Chantal of his plans to marry a certain aristocratic widow (not from love or need, but because she controls a few votes in the Academy's upcoming membership election). In the course of this family conversation, Bernanos begins to work his magic as an author. De Clergerie first suggests, with timidity and hesitations, that Chantal might be happier in a convent than a home managed by the countess. But she has no interests in a formal religious life, knowing it to be a vocation, not a career path or escape hatch. She controls her temper and gently refuses. His wishes thwarted, de Clergerie's attitude turns suddenly abusive. He spews all his inner vitriol, revealing an intense and multi-layered selfishness through his elaborate and obviously false rationalizations. (Unlike Cènabre, the father does not see the truth about himself.) Chantal flees the room and the chapter ends.

Unlike the first two novels, most scenes in the first hundred pages are heavy in dialogue, relying less on editorial narration to achieve their effects. This Dostoevskyan feature of the book is my strongest memory of Bernanos's DIARY OF A COUNTRY PRIEST (published eight years after JOY), which I hope to reread this year.

[Alain · Rating 4 out of 5]

les amours adultères d'un couple vieillissant, pied de nez aux conventions racontés en trois parties, par la fille qui trouve l'écrit de son père après sa mort, puis l'homme et la femme. A la limite, mais jamais dans le banal et des clichés il reste une forme de lumière joyeuse et émouvante.

[Maman à Paris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book . Once I got into it, couldn't let go! And yet I'm absolutely against affairs of any kind but the caracters are very lovable and of course Italy is a fine setting.